Losing one’s friends to death is the price we must eventually pay for the gift of being alive, and last week I paid a steep one when Cardinal William H. Keeler, the 14th archbishop of Baltimore, died at age 86.Laudatory obituaries noted the cardinal’s membership as a youth in the Boy Scout movement, where he met many Jewish and Protestant Scouts. The obituaries also recounted his 1955 ordination to the priesthood and his participation as a special adviser during the Second Vatican Council, when the world’s Catholic bishops overwhelmingly adopted the historic Nostra Aetate (“In Our Time”) declaration that represented a revolutionary change in the church’s teachings toward Jews and Judaism.